Solar Hot Air

Wondering what we’ve been up to with our plans for solar? We’re moving full steam ahead to meet the Sept 15 deadline for project completion for the Make Mine Solar program.

We’ve installed two solar hot air panels on the south side of our house, which faces a street so we have very good sun exposure. The inside work — a blower fan enclosure — is being completed this weekend. We believe this system will heat the second floor more than sufficiently. We’ve been told to expect 85 degrees or more on sunny winter days and as we only heat our house to 55 degrees, that would be amazingly toasty.

In a few weeks, we’ll have the solar electric panels installed on the roof. Unfortunately, Xcel Energy’s Solar Rewards program has run out of funds for 2011 and it’s unclear if we’ve made the cutoff. Our installer, Innovative Power Systems, thinks not.

That doesn’t mean we won’t get our rebate – we just won’t get it this year. We’ll get both the Xcel and the federal tax rebates next year.

What we’ll get this year is heat in our bedroom in December (yippee!) and – we hope – electricity flowing from our roof by October.

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About thinkofitasanadventure

We are a 50-something couple living in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. We attended a sustainability conference at our local high school in November 2010, with keynote speaker Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute. What we heard shocked us deeply. We finally understood the need to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. We immediately began to change the way we live. We joined together with other folks in our neighborhood to learn more, to do more and to have fun doing it! We're part of Transition Longfellow. We're choosing to change now and to "think of it as an adventure." If you are on this journey too, we'd love to hear from you.